


new springs, good water

by TomBowline



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Bathing/Washing, Developing Relationship, First Time, M/M, POV Captain Francis Crozier, Porn with Feelings, Post-Canon Fix-It, Prostate Stimulation, Recovery, Sexual Dysfunction, Sharing a Bed, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:06:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28115889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TomBowline/pseuds/TomBowline
Summary: They were here for the winter - here at the Hudson’s Bay Company outpost that they had crawled to like corpses, sequestered in the safety of the fur-traders’ ramshackle lodgings until the sun saw fit to start rising again and they could haul away for home.James and Francis venture into uncharted territory.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames
Comments: 16
Kudos: 116





	new springs, good water

**Author's Note:**

> Title from ["A Poem of Love in Eleven Lines"](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/148774/a-poem-of-love-in-eleven-lines) by Gerrit Lansing.

They were here for the winter - here at the Hudson’s Bay Company outpost that they had crawled to like corpses, sequestered in the safety of the fur-traders’ ramshackle lodgings until the sun saw fit to start rising again and they could haul away for home. The sickest men were kept in the main building, where the doctor could get at them the easiest; the healthier seamen and petty officers were in one smaller shack, the officers (including Lieutenant Jopson, thank you) in another. For himself, Francis had been offered the use of a third. 

He utilized the clapboard building for sleep, the disturbed slumber of a sailor faced with solitude, but during the day he eschewed those four walls to haunt the outpost like a restless shade. He watched with all the helplessness of an incorporeal ghost as his men suffered, as they recovered or succumbed. In the face of every man who perished he felt the bite of responsibility - his men, his to command, his to look after. They were here for the winter, shut up safe, yet at first he felt as unmoored as if he were still wandering the shale. 

But in the darkness of November there was a light, showing up the sun as it refused to shine, for James was well enough to join Francis in his shack. 

He was taking food and water well, he had shown no danger of a relapse in fever, he could sit up now and be sensible of his surroundings; as such, the doctor had decided he ought to be removed from the unwashed masses of sick sailors and repaired to shared quarters with his co-captain. James had yipped and snarled a bit, affronted at the idea of making himself better-off than his men, but in the end the prospect of relief from falling asleep to the snores of thirty other sailors seemed to win out. That, and - Francis could hope - the prospect of renewing the companionable proximity that had begun to knit the two of them together on the long walk. 

He was, really, quite a bit better. Francis was assured of this anew every time James smiled at him, pushed himself up on his elbows, made some jibe against the state of the blankets - _being fur traders and all, you’d think they’d be more concerned with keeping the moths out of their bounty_ \- or the Company food - _really, we had better caribou than this in ’46, that cook doesn’t do the fine beast any favors by stewing it so abominably_ \- with a bit of the old arch humor that did not vex Francis half so much now as it used to. James was getting better. 

Yet the same helpless fear still clutched Francis each night, when he would lie huddled on one creaky cot next to James’ slack form on another, when he would try to fall asleep to James’ dragging fussing breaths, when he would give up and stare at the high windows of their little shack to see the strangely shifting shadows of moon and cloud and star travel slow across the rough-cladded ceiling. The moon went from fat to starved to fat again and he could not see the flesh on James’ bones that the Company doctor was so certain he had gained back. The low Arctic winds howled through uncaulked gaps in the boards and he listened unthinking and rigid for a sound from James that would send him fumbling upright to help. Night after night, James drifted into the uneasy sleep of the sick and Francis stayed awake, awake, awake. 

James was shivering tonight, teeth clacking audibly and bird-body shaking beneath the blankets. Francis would be all alarm now, had he not been similarly afflicted himself - it was not the scurvy, he thought, only some strange pernicious muscle memory. They had been so very cold, so tense with pain and sorrow, for such a time that their bodies did not know another way to be. The same had befallen himself and James Ross after the Antarctic. Francis had lain through many a night in this horrid deja-vu, rattling the bed with his shaking, tensing and relaxing in vain attempts to quit the horrid inclination. But this was the first night he had seen it prey upon James, and - he felt a sudden pull, a drive to do something about it. He had been through it alone, twice now; James need not suffer in solitude as he had.

He was at the head of James’ cot and peering down at the tense moonlit mountain range of his sleeping face when he realized he knew not at all what to do. Ought he to wake James? What good would that do? He had some vague thoughts of the recent past, sharing a sleeping sack and rattling against each other until they were both clammy with the pained warmth of bodies trying to survive the unsurvivable. But this formless urge seemed somehow indecorous, now that they were once again in sight of civilization. So he stood transfixed, uncertain as a lubber on his first passage, watching the spare grind of James’ sharp jaw as he twitched within his cocoon of fur and wool.

After a long chilly minute, James saved him from further dithering by opening his eyes and staring up at him, jittery, imploring. “Francis,” he whispered. “Come down here, for Christ’s sake.”

Francis stared; James stared back, half mulish and half desperate. “Please,” he breathed, “don’t make me ask again.”

In the little bed with James he wrapped his hands around his shoulders, let himself be bundled into holding James down with the weight of his body. _Still, now,_ he thought but could not say aloud, _be still and rest._

He fell asleep to the minute shivering of James’ frayed-rope muscles against his own, the weak weight of James’ hand on his back, and the revelation that oh, lying like this he could feel the flesh that James had gained. In his gently rising chest, nearly steady; in the upper region of his uninjured arm, tucked into Francis’ neck. Thank god, he thought, thank god.

He returned the next evening from a day full of little miracles - Jopson sitting up at a woefully spotty shaving mirror with a steady hand, Hartnell walking among the other seamen to share spoken bits of affirmative nothing, Tom Blanky volleying half-meant piss and vinegar at the doctor for keeping him abed so long - to find yet another, albeit a rather ill-advised one, taking place. James was sitting up, leaning out of bed at an alarming angle, and dragging Francis’ cot laboriously to abut his own. 

There was a long moment, upon Francis’ entrance, wherein they were once again frozen: James staring at him with very much the air of being caught, he scrutinizing James in tentative confusion. Then James coughed and ventured a, “You’re letting a draft in,” at the same instant as Francis began to hurry himself across the room to assist James before he did himself an injury, and the spell was broken.

“The devil,” Francis asked when he had shooed James’ hands away and pushed the two cots together with sufficient precision, “did we just do that for?”

James frowned at him rather peevishly for a man whose whims had just been so indulged. “I had it in hand,” he griped (Francis could not suppress a snort; James had been almost parallel to the floor and dewy-faced with the sweat of exertion when he had been happened upon). Then, in a voice with rather too much of airiness about it, “Thought it would give us a bit more space.” He chewed at the inside of his cheek, picked at a knot in the wool blanket as if he meant to unravel the whole thing. “I believe I will have the shakes again tonight.”

When the curtain of night descended fully - it was less dramatic this far south, deep blue instead of pitch black, like looking down into the sea - it found them both steady-limbed, but folded around each other firmly all the same. Francis had to labor not to wedge down into the dip between their sad wool mattresses; he had to curl his legs up terribly to prevent his feet freezing. He slept better than he had for months.

It was a good system - it worked for them both. When James began to sweat through his shirts in mid-January, Francis was able to notify the doctor in time to bring the fever down with the application of seal fat, raw mussels, and boiled lichen (the Company doctor had evidently been learning from some of the Inuit who came now and then to trade, and had taken to applying indiscriminately all the many and varied advices he received; the best James had to say for the experience was that it was a right sight better than being bled, but at least one of the menagerie of cures seemed to have therapeutic value); when Francis would awake in half-remembered terror, the familiar rhythm of James’ breath (and, at those times when he managed to wake James in the throes of it, the soft-murmured conversation they would make in the dim glow of early morning) would bring him back to himself. Beyond this utility, there was a simple comfort in it: a raw and powerful peace that came of holding James that way, not quite in health but on the upward swing of sickness.

Of course, their newfound peace did not prevent the nightmares from coming to begin with.

_He was on Terror, tonight, with the scent of wood and ice and coal-smoke in the air. Alarms were sounding, men shouting up on deck; the beast, he thought with a clutch of panicked fear. If he did not get up there quickly, he knew, it would take Tom’s other leg - his arm - it would eat him whole and it would be Francis’ fault for poor leadership._

_He moved sluggishly through the ship, feeling the sickening haze of drink about him and hating every moment. If he could just get up on deck, he thought, the cold air would revive him._

_He stepped out onto the weather deck and found himself on a vast plain of shale._

_Fifty men standing around a gibbet, one man standing on a box. No, two men - they had hanged them one by one, but all the same here they were side by side. Mr Hickey was silent as the rope was situated, silent as the charges were read, silent as the noose pulled taut. No last words but the echoing, sickening cracks, one following the other within an instant. No last words but the look in his eyes - flat, smug, like two polished stones, like the river Bann grimy from every factory upstream and catching the sun on its surface in a merry dance nonetheless, like he still expected to prance out of this no worse for wear. Chilling, yes, but then he had looked to Sergeant Tozer’s face and that had been worse - there was only simple mulishness there, the righteous belief of a man taken in. If there had been no Mr Hickey, there would be no hanging today._

_It devolved from there - he was on the podium, he was on the ground, there was a scuffle on the stones. A yell, a shot, a cry. Mr Armitage’s blood spilling out, a shock of color in the great grey nothing, a knife in his limp hand pointing to Francis like a compass-needle; Mr Jopson’s gun smoking, his eyes keen and his face somber, his chin dipped to Francis. Loss of life, waste of life. Jopson’s eyes turned glassy and unseeing, his face wrought with pain. His hand reaching for Francis, clutching from a great distance indeed, and the fog closing in, plunging all into white confusion—_

He woke with a jolt, sweating and rigid. Took in the glow of the lavender sky, the muted warmth of a camp stove, the more immediate warmth of a body beside him. He was not there, then, but here. Here with those who lived. 

It was almost spring, he realized, staring up at the lightening sky some minutes later as he tried unsuccessfully to drowse. He never could get back to sleep after a dream like that, and besides, he thought with a touch of melancholy and much more irritation, it _would_ almost be time for him to rise for the day and see to his duties as Captain. It should be a relief, the loss of this responsibility, for it meant that they were safe - yet he still _felt_ the responsibility, only none of the power for change that came with it.

James was beside him, face in the pillow, doing a much better job of drowsing - he had woken with Francis, groaned a soft little sound, and shuffled back off to sleep. Francis almost envied him - he had all his energy focused on recovery, with none left over for gnawing himself open with worry and agitation. Francis, on the other hand— 

It was almost spring, and what would they do then? 

Catch a ship back to England, be raked over at courts martial. Assuming he was not discharged altogether, he would have to push his luck still further by returning to his old role as a bloody great nuisance: to make the Admiralty acknowledge its role in the disaster; to force an overhaul in supply regulation, if necessary; to be certain they gave enough in compensation for the contentment of those who lived and the families of those who did not. He felt now as useless as the daftest ship’s boy, as good as stripped of his command already for want of anything constructive to do for his men; he could at least do them right once they were home. 

And James?

Would James go back to sea? Would he want to? And if he did not— 

Well, where would he go? He had a place, surely, a townhouse, an apartment, a club to disappear to full of rosy-cheeked young men who dreamt of glory. Yet Francis found he could not bear the thought. He wanted James to be happy, of course, it was only— He would like it very much if that happiness could be with him. It was not known, this thing they had between them in the scant inches of their makeshift bed, it was not charted on a map. He wished to be its explorer, with James by his side. 

He regarded James’ slack face for a long moment - peaceful, for once, lashes resting calm on bruised cheeks. Not now. He sighed and turned over, back brushing James’ shoulder. There would be a moment to ask. He would just have to take it when it came.

Such a moment arrived, at long last, shortly before they were set to leave the outpost. Other than sorely-needed baths when they had first arrived, they had been conducting their hygiene as sailors (and indeed fur-trappers) were wont to - a wet rag swiped under the clothing, with soap if they were lucky - but the Company doctor had ordered them all properly bathed in preparation for the voyage home. The premise was, as Francis understood it, that a miasma was less likely to develop if the odors of the body were depressed by washing. On balance, however, he did not much care what the science of it was - the outcome was a copper tub full of steaming water, and that was enough for him.

The seamen, poor lads, all had to share one tub - called up one after the other by last name, with the certainty that by the time they had reached past the letter M the water would be quite tepid. Even the officers were sharing. But he and James only had to take turns with each other, which was no hardship at all. 

Or it would not be, if James did not insist upon doing all the work of drawing the bath by himself. 

“Honestly,” Francis was saying, to no effect whatsoever. “You’ll open your wounds, man, let me help.”

“They’re long closed over,” James said with an air of reproach, as if Francis should be familiar enough with James’ body to know this already - and the thing was that he did know it, he had changed James’ bandages until the scars had gone clean and pink, he had watched him grow more adept at pulling on a shirt without wincing, he had memorized obsessively the state of those three welts and of the pale skin around them. Still, one could never be too careful, and Francis told him so now with just an edge of panic in his voice as James hefted a drum of steaming water off the little stove and poured it shakily into the tub. 

“Francis,” James replied, with a touch of the old haughtiness that had been so scrubbed away - Francis found with a shock that he was something like _glad_ to hear it back again - “I have been careful for six wretched months now.” He tugged back the next drum of water that Francis had begun to clutch at with an eye to help him lift it. Francis held fast. “If you do not let me see to this one thing myself I don’t know what I shall do.”

Francis’ hand creaked on the warm metal. He looked at James, studied his face - found his own fractious frustration reflected back at him uncannily. 

“Christ, James,” he sighed. He had been on the way to angry, but he suddenly found it all drained away to be replaced by an encompassing exhaustion. “I can’t do a bloody thing. Can you see that? Captain of the expedition entire and I can’t do a bloody thing worth the doing.” James frowned, looking to be on the verge of interruption - Francis shook his head, and James acquiesced. ( _Just like that,_ he thought, _he’s quiet just like that. If that drunken fool could see us now.)_ “The men live or they die and I can’t do a thing about it. I can’t write to their families because the post only comes once a year. I can’t plan, I can’t command, I can’t do a thing that befits me. Now would you sit down and let me run a bath for my Second before I shrivel up into dust for want of work.”

James released the drum with careful hands and sat. He looked pensive, studying Francis with soft eyes. Even with his back turned to heft the water up onto the stove, Francis could feel the steady weight of that gaze on him. 

At last, when Francis was stood waiting for the water to warm, James put words to his gaze: “Has it crossed your mind that this time is for your recovery as well?”

Francis stared at him. “Nothing the matter with me,” he countered. It wasn’t exactly the truth - there were the nightmares, of course, and the sickening agitation that drove him to pace about the outpost and stick his nose in where he was not wanted - but he wasn’t ill, either, not in a way that could be fixed with bed rest and lemon juice. 

“Francis.” James frowned. “You shake just as much as I do.” 

When Francis turned away from him, busying himself with the water, James went on: “Would it be so very bad not to have to do anything, just for awhile?”

A choked little laugh bubbled up from Francis’ throat at this. “Yes,” he said wildly, “I can’t just— Yes!”

He knew he was being troublesome, but he could not make himself be another sort of way just at the moment. Fortunately, James seemed willing to drop it. He held up his hands placatingly and leaned back on the bed. “Very well,” he sighed. Then, seeming to reach some kind of decision, he vaulted up with some difficulty and strode over to the tub, now full of passably warm water. With his eyes still stubbornly fixed on Francis he shrugged off his waistcoat and set to pulling his gansey over his head. “If you need something to do that badly,” he said - somewhat muffled now through the shuck of wool - “you can help your Second wash his hair.” His face reemerged from the white wool curtain to stare at Francis - expectant, almost belligerent, wide around the eyes in the way that meant he was frightened and trying to hide it.

Francis stared back at him; then at length, not wishing to seem eager (had he ever been more eager for anything?), he nodded. “Capital idea,” he replied, at a loss to say anything else. 

Chart it, learn it by heart, bring back what you know, he thought. Watch the man you love so fiercely and so tentatively take off his shirt, his trousers, his tall socks and long drawers. Watch the skin you’ve touched by accidental brushes in your sleep be unwrapped, watch the muscle you’ve seen come back by degrees be revealed like a feast, proof of vitality and of desire. Broad shoulders, long arms long hands long fingers, spare thighs, hair and flesh in the place between them, little hair anywhere else. Arching neck, flushing scars, pale skin like an endless storm-tossed beach with the sun coming out, a body that claws forth poetry from the dumb numbness of your old prosaic head. Put it all down in your mind and remember it well. 

When James sank into the water - Francis’ hand in his, steadying, covetously clutching - he sighed and rolled his head back on his neck, back to bump against the side of the tub and slide down as he situated himself. Francis watched the slight parting of his lips, the bob of his neck, for fear of watching anything else. He did not know how far James would be willing to go, how deep he would want to trek into this new territory. 

He set his hands on James’ shoulders to steady him again as he slipped in to wet his hair; his skin was warm, perfectly so, not the clammy heat of fever but the low-banked even radiance of health. With careful hands he made a lather from the wretched oily soap the Company provided and pushed his fingers gently through the fraying frizz of James’ hair. It looked better than it had, all combed and clean as it was now, but Francis predicted (silently - he did not wish to perturb James overmuch) that it would be months still before there was enough healthy growth for it to be cut to James’ preferred length. In the meantime he treated it with care, avoiding the weal of scarring at James’ hairline and using only fingertips on the rest of his scalp. This hair that he had mocked and sneered at - he would be ever so happy when it was grown in again as lovely as before. Ever so relieved. 

James had taken to making quiet little sighs and groans as Francis worked; Francis felt dizzy with the sounds, with the feel of James’ scalp under his hands, with the openness of this whole endeavor. When James passed him a wet flannel, he soaped it and began rubbing it over James’ neck and chest almost as if in a trance. How long it had been since he’d felt the give of skin against his hand, the indescribable singing relief of human touch, the spring of healthy flesh rather than pallid papery illness. A touch not of consolation, not of simple confirmation of togetherness in the face of expected grief, but of mutual desire, syrupy in its dawdling luxuriant timelessness. James’ chest, James’ nipples peaking in his fingers. James’ stomach shivering not from cruel memory but from anticipation. The taut lines of James’ thighs, just out of reach—

Francis lost his balance, chin nudging down into James’ shoulder. 

A moment. Back protesting, limbs frozen in place, shirt soaking up water. 

“Why don’t you join me.” James’ mouth at his brow. “I believe you’d have an easier time of it.”

There was barely room for two in the tub; the water trembled precipitously near to the copper lip, and Francis had to take a long and undignified moment to arrange himself suitably around James. Still it felt like slotting into a proper place, like tying a knot correctly for the first time. Like seeing, all of a sudden, how something is meant to be. 

With his calves brushing James’ flanks, with James having turned obligingly to fit himself between Francis’ legs and set his head like a great affectionate cat upon the diminished padding of Francis’ chest, he set to work again with soap and flannel. Pressed taut to sweep up the length of James’ furred calves, sending the cloth around his thighs at leisure, petting at the hot crease of thigh and belly. Then as if it were an afterthought, taking James’ soft blushing prick in his hand and stroking over it with the soft flannel. James rolled his head against Francis’ shoulder, pressed his face into his neck, sighed high and broken-up as Francis set the cloth aside and touched, exploring the skin of James’ hood and the silk of his shaft and the lightly-furred twitch of his stones. Even soft, it was a lovely little thing, plump and pink and gently pulsing with the vital blood of James’ being.

“It won’t rise,” James sighed apologetically. “Hasn’t for awhile now, I’m afraid.” Even so, he twitched his hips up into Francis’ grasp. 

Francis stilled his hand. “Shall I stop?”

“No,” James said after a long moment, sheepish. “It does feel nice.”

Francis supposed he ought to feel vaguely ridiculous, sitting in a bathtub and fondling another man’s soft cock - it should at least bring back echoes of his own ignominious attempts at self-abuse over the sodden haze of the past few years. But whatever shame he had, whatever discomfort, was lost in the joy of being welcomed this way to James’ body. In a drafty little shack in the blessed south of nowhere, James Fitzjames was kissing his neck and spreading his legs open wider for his touch, and how could it be anything but a blessing?

Eventually, however, James seemed to tire of being pawed at thus, for he stretched up to Francis’ ear and said that if he liked - well - there is something else he could do for him. He spoke the words with a sort of caution, grip loose on Francis’ wrist as he guided his hand down to the soft wet wink of his entrance. Yes, Francis replied, tongue thick and cheeks hot, yes, of course.

James rose from the bath on unsteady legs, hovered about all the while by Francis’ hands. Under the inducement of James sprawled on their bed, half-wrapped in one of the thin towels that had been warming by the stove and grinning impishly at him, Francis gave himself a quick swipe over with a soaped rag and followed suit, coming to rest pink-skinned and chafed-dry beside him. He slid one hand up under the damp folds of the towel, feeling the gentle slope of James’ thigh give way to the hot crease of him. He was unbearably tight to the touch and twitching with a furnace heat; he thumped his head back on the bed, chin jutting out in muted patrician ecstasy, when Francis stroked around him in a gentle mapping tease of a touch. 

Francis took a tin of wool-grease from James’ jittery hand - the one from Francis’ own bedside, used for chapped lips and raw hands, he noted with amusement - and coated two fingers assiduously with the stuff. James’ cock stayed soft against his thigh, only giving a recalcitrant twitch now and again, as Francis breached him with one broad finger, but the way he pressed into Francis’ touch and the gasping groans he was making were proof enough that there was some pleasure in it for him. Indeed, the sight and sound of such ardency combined with the incendiary slick heat of James’ channel - James’ arsehole, his cunt, open to Francis’ questing fingers like a gift and a demand both - was making Francis’ own prick fatten where it lay against his belly. 

He savored the novelty of it, the complete lack of urgency, stroking himself absently with one hand as he coaxed James open on the other. They could take all the time they needed - there was no mortal fear, no frantic pulse of time running out, not even the wariness of being overheard. Nothing to hurry him but the demanding clutch of James around his fingers, pulling him in further; the full-body twitch when he struck a certain miraculous spot within the man’s body; the gasp and buck that seemed to say, _Again, again._

Francis was rolling his gaze attentively about James’ body, from glowing face to heaving chest to twitching cock, and as he continued his exploration of this spot he noticed a thickening in that last organ. It was not fully hardened, but it twitched and pulsed now with more determination, and pearly fluid had begun leaking from it in uneven blurts. On impulse he bent and pressed a kiss to the head, lapped under the hood to suckle at what was streaming from it - salty, bitter, the distillation of laborious desire. James groaned and writhed beneath him, bucking equivocally between Francis’ mouth and his fingers. “In me,” he breathed, sounding as if he were struggling for breath though Francis felt his belly moving steady against his cheek. “Francis, please, please, in me, now. Now?” And again Francis could only breathe out _Yes, yes, of course. James. James._

The clutch of James’ body around his own, slippery with grease and so vocally inviting yet still tight as a vise, was unlike anything Francis had felt. After years of feeling nothing at all in this sort of way, it was an oasis, a deliverance - Francis felt like he could drink the whole sea dry, having tasted this one drop. He wanted more than ever, with a fierce and familiar longing, to memorize this man; to catch up where he was behind on the marvelous workings of his body and mind and heart. To build a little wooden shack in the middle of the nowhere that was James Fitzjames and make a life there - he had rarely fancied himself the settling sort of pioneer, and never had he truly meant it when the fancy did occur; he did now, he would. 

He came to rest with his face to James’ own, moving shallowly over the spot that made James’ prick drool and his hands convulse in the threadbare sheets. The face below him, with its deep distinctive lines, with its healed sores and its one cloudy eye, with its lips open in a wanton release of breath, seemed to cry out to be kissed. And so he did, at last, what he had been aching to do for an atrocious length of time - he dipped down, haltingly, and caught James’ lips in his own. It was a plea, transmitted in the soft give of lips and the swipe of a tongue; a plea for what, Francis could not quite articulate, but when James reached a hand up to stroke up Francis’ back and pull him in closer by the nape of his neck he felt it was well understood. 

How long it took him to reach his crisis, Francis could not say. It felt rather secondary - a trailing addition to the raw facts of James’ arse around his prick, James’ cock slicking his belly, James’ lips sucking on his tongue, James’ hand stroking his flank. When his end did come it took him by thundering force, shocking in its intensity - he had not felt anything so _good_ that strongly in months. Yet his foggy attention was still fixed on James, who hissed and pressed back onto him to feel the rush of spend he was being flooded with. James, who bit his lip so prettily and dragged his fingers through the shockingly copious mess on his own belly. James, who seemed to melt into their lumpy bed in perfect contentment despite his prick still being only half-hard. His James, he could not help thinking - a thought painful in its earnestness. His wonderful James. 

He took the flannel from the tub - they might, he thought, just have to reheat the water and bathe again, for all the use they gained of it the first time - and passed it over them both, feeling the wilt of James’ cock under the cold cloth with sympathy but with the understanding that he had really been satisfied, if not in the usual way. Then he slid into bed beside James, slipped the hastily discarded furs over the both of them, and settled in for a long spell of draping himself boneless across the naked form of his second in command. 

This, too, he felt as he gazed up at the blinding blue sky that peeked through their high little windows, was water to a parched man. All those nights he had lain next to James, nearly on top of him, so close yet unable to discern the breed of closeness it was - and now they were here, blessedly still and insensate at the mid of day, decadently naked in this frozen country and wrapped about each other unmistakably. The crook of James’ arm and his chest was a furnace where Francis’ neck was tucked into it; the rise and fall of his belly was as steady as a skilled blacksmith’s bellows under Francis’ hand; the chilled extremity of his foot tangled lazily in the hair on Francis’ calf like an absent stroking for a familiar pet. Beneath it all Francis still could feel that aimless and frustrated current of anxiety, but he found he could ignore it for the moment. This, this private exploration, was task enough for him.

He turned his face upwards, barely meeting James’ lidded eye by the stretch of his neck. Before he could speak James bent and pressed a kiss to his forehead - and in the dumb pleased surprise of it the words tumbled out unrehearsed. “Come live with me?”

“I’d like that,” James said at once, nodding vigorously. There had been more: _I’ll have to let a proper house, you should help me choose; Would you prefer London or the countryside? North or south?; I’d marry you if I could; Will you return to sea?_ There would be time for it all, Francis thought, and laid his head back down.

Above them a shadow blotted the spring light from their window for a brief moment, then another, another still; a strange discordant noise wended its faint way through the walls. _A yell, a cry._ Francis felt James tense, then relax, in tandem with himself - the alarm of command was not a thing easily forgotten. 

“Geese,” James breathed out in a tone half-chagrined. “Flying north.” He pointed, as if to make certain Francis saw, like a child in the park who has spotted a dog; indeed, a sparse vee of geese was making its meandering way past first the south window of their shack and then the north, bobbing unsteadily in the air and calling out to one another in that eerie affirmation - _here we are, I’m here, where are you, there you are._

Francis reached up and pulled James’ hand back into the blankets. He let it rest atop his own on James’ chest, above his heart, above his scar, and it felt once again like something settling into its proper place. _Here we are, traveling together._


End file.
